When Vanja and I visited Trondheim (my city of birth) for the holidays, we went to a comic book store called “Outland”. This store has been selling various manga/anime/game related stuff for years, and this time we found two hard-cover comics from Junji Ito. He actually had his own shelf dedicated to his works.

Vanja, who has been a big fan of his works for years, introduced me to Junji Ito’s comics when we started dating back in 2007. Before I moved in with her in 2008, and still lived in Trondheim, she let me borrow “Uzumaki” , his most known works. I’ve seen a bunch of weird and bizarre japanese movies throughout the years, but to this date I haven’t read anything like this. And of course, only someone from Japan could make up stuff like this. His unique drawing style makes it a morbid, fun and fascinating reading experience. Highly recommended.

(And I also saw the movie based on the Uzumaki comics afterwards, which wasn’t that great… Maybe I’ll talk more about it another time.)

“Frankenstein” and “Shiver” is a collection of Junji Ito’s short comics (with “Frankenstein” actually being one of his longer comics, but the book also contains several of his short stories). And I never cease to be amazed by his totally weird imagination. Giant head-shaped balloons flying around and using their rope to hang people, a house with people living as puppets controlled by wire, and a fashion model that is actually a hideous monster… yeah, only Junji Ito could come up with stuff like that.